Red Kite Rally 2005 - WTRA

Words By Colin Jones Photos by Colin and Keith Davies

What a day for Alvington! Two major awards from the red Kite!

Mark Harris gets Runner-Up in Trail Class and Georgina Groom comes away with the 'Spirit of the Red Kite' award. Perhaps we should pick up that Taff Davies, marshalling at the event, also hails from Alvington. Maybe it is something in the water... Ah well, there goes another theory.

Your writer had the pleasure of helping run the second Special Test finish where it was pleasing to see Georgina's L plate come into view on the last lap after over 100 miles of off-road and still keeping a good pace up. Mark Harris was more of a blurr coming through the final mud hole on his last lap but consistency pays as he was only half a second slower than his first lap time of 509 seconds. Ian Vessey and Glenn Thomas also had a battle but that was mostly with the bikes as Ian had sportingly chosen to ride his trusty Yamaha Tenere 600 in the trail class on what appeared to be racing slicks. Glenn's Sports class DRZ had a radiator shield eaten by the terrain and he sadly threw away about 4 minutes of test time after mistaking one spectator strewn mud hole as the test end and stopped, waiting to laugh at Vess getting splattered. These incidents allowed Vess to beat him on 2 of the tests but Glenn was so much quicker on the other 2 that overall he was only 1 minute down on Vess.

Results were still at the provisional stage when going to press but should be found on Keith's WTRA Website soon.